Notices

A new summary for progress since this.

1. Basic functionality is present, one can share the cellular data connection over Ad-Hoc Wifi. Requires a custom kernel with NAT support. See the project homepage for instructions.

2. WEP encryption is available. Supporting WPA will require infrastructure mode (see below) AFAIUnderstand.

3. Qole with help from wek has managed to do NAT in userland (without using custom kernel). Need to look into all implications of that later (it would be very nice from normal user POV not having to install custom kernel, OTOH using custom kernel is much more efficient).

4. Infrastructure (or AP) mode is "imposible" (as in: not going to happen with these resources, if you can reverse-engineer the chip firmware and hack a way to patch support in: let us know when it works reliably on the N900).

5. Mesh networking is still not even under investigation. It would be mighty cool though so if you have time and interest please look into it.

Version 0.3.3 now in extras-proper.

NOTE: fMMS seems to interfere with the hotspot backend.

NOTE: Pelota widget seems to interfere with the hotspot backend; see this post.

NOTE: IP-widget seems to interfere with the hotspot backend; see this post.


If you have questions not answered in this thread, please check the linked thread first (I know it's 18 pages, don't be a lazy whiner)

I have compiled 2.6.28-20100903+0m5 (PR1.2?) kernel, modules and flasher.

The iphb patch applied as is, minstrel patch didn't. There seems to have been quite many changes in the minstrel module but the particular issue fixed by the old patch may not have been fixed (basically it leads to reboots with certain other chipsets [commonly found in mac laptops] connecting to the ad-hoc network, so it's quite easy to test...).

I have not yet tested these though they should work fine with rest of the firmware being still PR1.1. (For certain values of fine; for example the minstrel module might need a revised patch...)

Thanks to hcm, WEP is now configurable via the UI (however it does not yet show the automatic zero padding done by backend if your key is too short)

Anyone had any luck connecting to a hotspot network from a Linux system? I know network manager has issues connecting to ad-hoc networks, but I also tried manually connecting to it from the CLI and I cannot get an IP address from the n900 when I run dhclient wlan0

~Jeff

Just to be sure: You have the hotspot backend running correctly on the hotspot kernel on N900 ?

Do you have any other computer/device to test with ?

If you add IP/mask manually can you ping the N900 ?

Sometimes with my mac laptop it seems to connect to the ad-hoc network but I get no IP and cannot ping the N900 even if I configure everything manually, don't really know why this happens, sometimes it just does.

I just tested it successfully with my Aspire one 531 netbook with Ubuntu Netbook Remix.
No problems with and without WEP, just configuring with the GUI (Gnome NetworkManager 0.7.996)
I'm not using the newest hotspot-kernel, but 2.6.28-hotspot. It may even be self-compiled, because I played with some options (but no hotspot-relevant options).

I remember it was not much of a problem with my old laptop with kubuntu, but since I have this netbook, I prefer using the builtin UMTS-modem

You probably don't need to run the full ROBIN distribution as we already have one running ...
It's basically a well packaged modded OpenWRT with OLSRd or BATMAN (mostly OSLR). So maybe just packaging OLSRd would do the trick with some plugins for auto IP attribution and stuff like that.
I had a look at this back in the n8x0 days but didn't manage to solve the full problem...

Reorganized directory structures a bit (in preparation for a larger refactoring) and thus packaged version 0.2.0.

As usual see the project homepage for full instructions.

As I now have userspace nat working really well with just one userspace application running (instead of the aproach quole had tried out with my help) we could think of putting that together with the kernel aproach under the same gui - for the ones not that daring to flash the kernel.
Maybe one additional word about userland aproach - joikuspot has
dependencies to the kernel as well. So if you get a kernel update from
nokia you still would at least have to recompile the joikuspot-kernel-
module against ist - which is possible as this part was put under GPL.
Till recently I was quite happy with my aproach using PAN instead
of WLAN where all the interactivity needed is done by already present
software on the N900 - just added a udev script which starts up my
nat application automatically. This aproach also uses much less
power than WLAN...
But when I tried to connect my wife's mobile (android 1.6 - HTC tattoo)
to the N900 for internet connection I figured out that obviously PAN is
not supported - or I'm just too dumb.
For that case it would have been nice to be able to enable wireless.
So what do you say.
What my userland-aproach would need is the same setup of the
wireless part but just without DHCP, an IP-Address and any NAT-Rules.
Instead of that you would just do e.g. an "ifconfig wlan0 0.0.0.0" to bring
the interface up and start an applciation pointing to wlan0.
A good place to host the two patched needed for qemu and what is
needed to build would probably be the mobilehotspot garage project.

FWIW, AFAIK, android 1.6 doesn't support ad-hoc networking.